EclipseCon '08 - BoF - Building a local Eclipse user group

BoF - Building a local Eclipse user group User groups are springing to life all over Europe - and likely elsewhere. In this BoF, we will talk about how to build interest for a local community, tips for events, how to get sponsors for the events and similar essential user group stuff. One hope is that we might be able to setup series of similar events in a region - e.g. Europe - where we can get companies to show they stuff multiple times... Easier for us and likely more interesting for them as they get a bigger audience... At the end of the meeting we should hopefully setup a mailing list or similar to help exchange ideas for events in the future as well.

About Me
Founder and owner of The RCP Company
20 years of experience in system development in major companies
Regnecentralen (now ICL)
Digital (now HP)
Anritsu (previously NetTest)
9 years experience as the Systems Architect of an 20+ MLoC project
5 years of experience with Eclipse and Eclipse RCP
Add-in Provider Member of the Eclipse Foundation
Chairman of Eclipse.dk

Agenda
Making a user group
Who are the intended members?
What is the expected benefits for the members?
How will you meet?
How often will you meet?
What type of events do you want?
What type of web site do you want or need?
Where do you get the money?
Marketing of your User Groups
How to start?
How can we all benefit?

Who are the intended members?
Users of the Eclipse IDE
What about users of commercial products based on the Eclipse IDE such as IBM RAD, BEA Workshop, CodeGear JBuilder 2007 or many other products?
Users of the Eclipse RCP platform
Providers of commercial products such as IBM, BEA and CodeGear
Providers of Eclipse based services such as The RCP Company, ProSyst, AvantSoft and many, many others
Students that use Eclipse in their studies or base their thesis on Eclipse based technologies
Eclipse.dk:
All of the above
(for the same reason we call ourselves “the Eclipse.dk society”)

What is the expected benefits for the members?
Forum for exchange of new ideas
Forum for discussions of specific problems
How do I do this?
What is wrong here?
Forum for introduction of new technologies
What is EMF, RCP, Equinox, e4, Maynstall,…
How to install and use CDT?
Informal meeting place for competitors
Incubator for nerd projects
Controlling the coffee machine from the cell phone?
Interfacing to Lego Mindstorm?
Marketing (but don’t tell anybody)
We do interesting stuff in an interesting environment
We hire
We…
Eclipse.dk:
Forum for new ideas and technologies
Marketing

How will you meet?
IRC
Forum
Mailing lists
Code Camps
PluginFests
After-work events
All-day events
Eclipse.dk:
After-work events (RCP, RCP business case, OSGi, EMF, EclipseCon ’08, CDT, …)
Forum
All-day events
Mailing lists

How often will you meet?
Depends on the activities
Forums and mailing lists of open always
After-work meetings and all-day events needs to be scheduled
Eclipse.dk:
We try to have an after-work meeting every 3-4 weeks
And an all-day event every 6 months

What type of web site do you want or need?
Depends on your activities
Can be very easy with many free solutions including Google Groups and Google Sites
Can be mailing list hosted by eclipse.org
Eclipse.dk:
Independent web site ( eclipse.dk ) – might be migrated to Google Sites soon
Open user group site ( version2.dk ) – with calendar and forum

Where do you get the money?
Depends on you activities
A mailing list costs next to nothing, all-day events can be expensive
Get donation by bigger companies – hint: ask IBM, BEA and other local Eclipse product providers
Eclipse.dk:
Companies < 20 employees: 1000 DKK (~200$)
Companies >= 20 employees: 5000 DKK (~1000$)
Private members: free
After-work meetings: 100 DKK (~20$)
All-day events: 250 DKK (~50$)

Marketing of your User Groups
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Regional_Communities
Lists all(?) current user groups by region
Several mailing lists by the Eclipse foundation
Regional news groups on Google Groups
News groups at universities
Your mailing lists and forum
The networks of the participants
Your customers(!)

How to start?
Find 2-3 people that can drive the user group
Agree on the purpose and wanted type of members
Gather approximately 10 members
Select a board
Set up a schedule for 3-4 after-work meetings with subjects you can manage yourself
Do marketing

How can we all benefit?
Setting up events takes time
Locations
Food
Participants
And not least: getting the right ideas for events
Many international companies like to participate in events
Even more if they should just repeat the performance
So what about a mailing list where we share ideas?
How can events be done
Sharing speakers
How about exchanging call-for-meetings globally?

EclipseCon '08 - BoF - Building a local Eclipse user group

by Tonny Madsen on Nov 12, 2010

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EclipseCon ’08 - BoF - Building a local Eclipse user group — Presentation Transcript